Hanging out with killers
PLANTS: A CARNIVOROUSLY GREEDY COLLECTION
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s found something interesting in Houghton.
They might seem innocent but behind these deceptive fronds lies death by poison, strangling or desiccation. Their victims are often doped first to limit struggling.
It’s humid, the water below simulating the marshy conditions that these notorious and voracious guys prefer for their turf.
The American Trumpet Pitchers are cunningly good looking, tall and handsome, many forced from the US because of development. These are under the protection of Renee Mendelow.
She’s especially fond of those with necks dark with glugged corpses. Victims end up there having hung giddily onto the lips of their pouting hunters. From there it’s a slippery slope.
I’ve previously only known Venus Fly Traps pictured on some of my Portmeirion dinner plates, never realising how aptly.
They’re carnivorously greedy, for such relatively short operators. The ends of their appendages have hand-like weapons that snap shut over the bodies of crawling and flying victims.
They darken with the effort of squeezing out body fluids. Ingestion completed, they release what’s left, just a husk of the for- mer being.
Renee says people keep them as “pets”, giving them names. Did she narrow her eyes just slightly there?
“Do you hear that?” she turns quickly. “I think that’s someone being swallowed!”
I wonder if it has anything to do with my stomach having just made a small yodelling noise. Could I be hungry? I hope there is no sinister association with these known killers.
In an even steamier tent we meet the Tropical Pitchers, graceful Indonesians with gorgeous colouring and long smooth necks, who specialise in death by drowning. Their sinuous bodies perform gracious loops and they have sensuously open mouths, known to favour rodents and frogs as well as insect courses.
The air around is sweet, proof perhaps that you don’t have to stink like a stapelia if you want to be attractive to flies and things. “Another one!” whoops Renee. I look around but with the realisation that my tummy has just yowled again. Can that possibly be a sound carnivorous plants make?
Our last encounters are with professional stranglers, very different, with wild South African and Australian limbs, disarmingly called Sundews. They lie low, waiting for the unsuspecting and squeeze the life from them.
But we emerge unscathed, too large even for a Tropical Trumpet to tangle with.
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